Pathfinder Module: "Heroes for Highdelve" [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

Heroes for Highdelve has an interesting background.  Produced for the 50^th anniversary of GenCon, it’s a combination of introductory Pathfinder adventure (plus incentive to buy the related Cavernous Lair flip-mat), advertisement for GenCon’s four iconic characters (presented in Pathfinder rules for the first time), and mini-product catalog for a miniatures & paint accessories company called Games & Gears (Booth # 2402!).  The product is 22 pages long, with maps on the inside front- and back-covers, 12 pages of adventure, 4 pages for the GenCon Iconics (integrated into the adventure with individual story hooks), and 4 pages for the Games & Gears products (which include minis of the Iconics and one of the villains).  Although obviously produced with commercial partners, the module is very professionally done, with excellent interior maps, artwork, and solid writing.  And, an awesome cover—if they made that into a poster, I’d hang it up!  I got to play Heroes for Highdelve via play-by-post for Pathfinder Society, and we used custom PCs (I had no idea the product was even intended for pre-gens).  For me, the module is most memorable as the first appearance of my Prophet of Kalistrade character, Nistivo Cirek.  For everyone else, the adventure itself is fine but forgettable. It does have value as a one-shot with a 2-3 hour running time (perfect for when the usual PFS 4-5 hour scenario running time won’t work).

SPOILERS!

 

Heroes for Highdelve is set in the eponymous town, which is located at the foot of the Goluskhin Mountains in Brevoy.  The PCs arrive during the annual Brightbloom Jubilee, a spring festival, and can have fun with various low-stakes games like sack races, kick-sack (hacky-sack), a puppet show, and more.  The adventure assumes the use of the pre-gens, who each have a reason for coming to Highdelve, and expects the PCs to be asking a lot of questions of the locals during this time.  Perhaps oddly though, but fortunately for custom PCs, most of the NPCs just give the questions the runaround or say the equivalent of “I’m busy now, but ask me tomorrow”; the actual adventure itself has nothing to do with the PCs’ individual quests.  My GM did an excellent job adapting the adventure for PFS, as it wasn’t until I read the module for this review that I realise how much he had to make up in order to get us hooked into the adventure.  Anyway, after some relaxed fun at the jubilee, the adventure kicks into gear when a pair of town youth stumble in, bruised and bloodied.  The pair were the town’s celebratory “Bloomgivers” this year, given the honour of walking to the nearby Dendra’s Slope to collect special flowers for the jubilee.  It turns out, however, that they were attacked by two other youths in town (Richelle and Tolwin) who were angry about not being chosen as Bloomgivers.  And worse, the (rather violent) juvenile delinquents even took the golden amulet of Aurelliax (the town’s gold dragon protector, who hangs out in human form) from the Bloomgivers!  “Are there any among you who are willing to be heroes for Highdelve?” asks Aurelliax.  Nistivo Cirek will—for the right price!

 

Part 2 of the module has the PCs travelling to Dendra’s Slope.  After finding the site of the attack, they’ll soon find (hiding nearby) Richelle and Tolwin.  What the PCs won’t be expecting is that the two aren’t by themselves—their attack on the Bloomgivers was prompted by an evil tiefling rogue named Feran the Pale.  (Feran had some sort of unrealistic plan to distract the townsfolk so he could steal from them, but the motivation here is pretty week).  I’ll just note as an aside that Richelle and Tolwin fight with longswords and Feran has sneak attack, so it’s perfectly possible that this seeming “playground bullies”-style adventure could become lethal (combats are first level being notoriously swingy in Pathfinder).

 

Part 3 of the module has the PCs facing off against what could be a pretty big threat: an ettin that is wearing Aurelliax’s amulet (it was part of Feran’s plan).  Alas, the ettin doesn’t have much in the way of personality, so this is a pure combat encounter.

 

And that’s it—there is a *very* short (one sentence) conclusion to the adventure.  As an introductory experience to Pathfinder, Heroes for Highdelve is certainly serviceable, though I don’t imagine the plot or writing will be especially impressive to newcomers to the game.

Curse of the Crimson Throne Recap # 81 [RPG]

[Fireday, 7 Arodus 4708 A.R. continued]

Having explored most of the second floor of Castle Scarwall proper, the Harrowed Heroes decide to turn their efforts to the roof of the guest wing.  A stubborn door has to be broken down.  But once The Reckoner and Anorak pass through it, the pieces of the door suddenly reassemble and Lorien’s voice can be heard shouting in an ominous tone: “Destroy the weak to weaken the strong!”  Yraelzin calls out “she’s been entranced!  Run!”  Eldritch and Yraelzin, trapped on the other side of the door with a suddenly-dangerous ally-turned-foe, flee at top speed while The Reckoner hammers furiously to break the door down again.  He succeeds just in time for Anorak to wrap Lorien up in a conjured mass of writhing black tentacles.  Soon, the group’s newest member is safely manacled, although bruised severely from the crushing grip of the tentacles.  The group’s two controlled zombies also perished in the fighting, but none consider that a great loss.

When he returns to the scene, Eldritch whispers to Anorak that he’s been saying all along there were assassins in the group!  The reptilian bird says they should slit Lorien’s throat while they still can, and that you can never trust a half-orc.  Anorak rebuffs the paranoid rantings as the group explores the roof of the guest wing to discover little of interest save a staircase leading down into it.  They decide to instead turn their attention to Castle Scarwall’s donjon (a fortified inner keep) and approach the set of bronze double doors leading to it.  The doors are so tarnished that they almost appear black, and gruesome images of devils and priests cavorting among the corpses and tortured souls of the damned are cast in bas-relief on its exterior while a skull and spiked chain overlook the entire scene from the center of the doors.

The Reckoner examines the doors carefully and realises two surprising things.  First, the stone wall around the doors has been magically altered to form a seal around their edges.  Second, the central seam has likewise been sealed with lead.  But where keys and picks may fail, The Reckoner’s trusty adamantine hammer never does!  He smashes down the door with several swings to reveal a foyer tiled in blood-red marble.  An altar resembling a skull, its lower section wrapped in iron chains and its top cut off flat to form a level surface, stands in an alcove to the east, while an alcove to the west contains a ten-foot-diameter pool of what appears to be stagnant water.

The Reckoner moves in cautiously, but is suddenly hurled back by blinding waves of magical force that would have killed a lesser man!  As he uses a wand of healing to recover, Anorak scrutinises the wards protecting the donjon and comes to a startling conclusion: there are two separate wards to keep people out, and two additional wards to keep people in!  Is the castle’s donjon a vault or a prison?  Anorak explains that it may be possible for he or Yraelzin to dispel the repulsion field, but the pain ward is far too powerful to remove.

Finding their efforts to force their way in stymied, the Harrowed Heroes regroup and decide to try to get in through the roof!  The Reckoner tries to climb the smooth stone walls of the donjon, but finds himself sliding back down repeatedly.  Anorak levitates up, a smirk on his face, and lowers a rope.  Soon, everyone is on the roof of the donjon.  Weak sunlight filters through the ever-present thin mist that hangs around Castle Scarwall like a gloomy veil.  Even the chill wind that blows off the crater lake at this altitude doesn’t disturb the mist at all.  Plate urges the group to hurry, reminding them that the rebels in Korvosa are planning to attack Castle Korvosa immediately because of the dark blood magicks killing random civilians.  In just minutes, the group find themselves at the point where the rest of Castle Scarwall connects to the strange, star-shaped tower that looms over it.  Interestingly, it becomes immediately obvious that the “Star Tower” is in fact much, much older than the rest of the castle—perhaps dating to Thassilonian times or even before!

With Anorak’s help, the group fly to the top of the Star Tower.  There, they find a single stone building with no obvious entrance.  The marble of both the building and the surrounding tower show no seams and are polished to a sheen, almost as if the entire structure were carved from a single immense shaft of stone.  But on the southeastern wall of the small stone building, a carving of a ten-foot-wide skull with spiked chains dangling from its eye sockets looks out over the castle below.  The carving can only represent one thing: Zon-Kuthon! Anorak examines the symbol carefully with his magically-enhanced senses, and realises that the carving is a type of magical entrance called a phase door, normally passable only by a true worshipper of the Midnight Lord.  But alas, with the curse affecting Scarwall, even the potent magic of the phase door cannot operate.

Although scarcely an hour has passed since they broke camp, the explorers are concerned that they’ve exhausted too many of their arcane resources and decide they should rest.  As they go about the procedure to set up camp on the roof of the Star Tower, little do they realize that their actions have been observed from afar ever since they first ascended.  For Castle Scarwall has many guardians, and not all stand sentinel inside the building.  Almost before it’s too late, the Harrowed Heroes see a quartet of four-armed brutish gargoyles swooping toward them!  Eldritch happens to be the closest to the gargoyles, and two immediately turn their attention (and appetites) to an exotic meal!  Anorak’s familiar flees with grievous wounds.  Yraelzin conjures spheres of crackling lightning to down two of the foes, but Anorak and The Reckoner (with the help of Plate’s limited enchantments) fly off the roof to help Eldritch.  It’s a near thing, but they manage to get there just in time!  The strange reptilian-bird that is Eldritch will live to fly another day . . .

Repulsed by the magical protections guarding the donjon and the Star Tower, the Harrowed Heroes have certainly learned one thing: nowhere in Scarwall is truly safe . . .

----------------------------------------

GM Commentary

As I've commented before, I really like to give familiars, intelligent weapons, hirelings, eidolons, and so forth a real personality and presence in the game if I can.  Eldritch was always fun to role-play, as he was paranoid and psychotic, always convinced that everyone was out to betray and kill him and Anorak.  When an NPC is only going to get limited screen time, you really have to give them some extreme personality characteristics to make them "pop", and that worked well with Eldritch.

The combination repulsion and forbiddance (if I remember correctly) wards were complex and a little confusing to run, because they had very different effects depending on each PC's alignment and the results had to be applied in a particular order.  The damage really hit animal companions and familiars hard.

I made it sound all smooth here, but I found Castle Scarwall a real challenge to run just given its enormous size and complexity.  (even physically juggling several flip-mats and finding table space was a logistical issue)  The challenge was even harder when the PCs went outside, because then I had to try to match up the (very detailed) interior maps with the (very sketchy) external drawing.  The gargoyle brutes ended up being pretty nasty, mostly because they were able to get in close before the PCs spotted them.  Eldritch just happened to be the closest, and the psycho bird barely escaped with his life.

Pathfinder Society Scenario # 2-S: "Year of the Shadow Lodge" [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

Year of the Shadow Lodge was the first Pathfinder Society multi-table Special event.  Compared to later Specials, it seems incredibly streamlined and straightforward, as there's no later innovations like different tables choosing different missions, aid tokens, mustering activities, etc.  Honestly, it was kind of refreshing.  That being said, although I liked the general idea of the scenario, I don't think the plot holds together very well and many of the combats are repetitive, very easy, and fairly bland.  I played it at highest subtier (10-11) with my Kellid Shaman, Gurkagh, via play-by-post last year.  I find the play-by-post conventions run Specials at incredible speeds (usually finishing weeks before the convention is set to end), which is unfortunate as everything becomes a bit of a blur.  Anyway, today, the Special is certainly playable but probably mostly of interest as an interesting development in the history of both the fictional and the real Pathfinder Society.

SPOILERS!

Prior to the events of Year of the Shadow Lodge, the fictional Pathfinder Society is largely unaware that there is a secret network of members dissatisfied with the group's slow pace and bureaucratic nature.  Apparently, there are dozens and dozens of members working to change the organisation within and plotting an eventual overthrow of its leadership, the masked Decemvirate.  However, the members of the Shadow Lodge are, by nature, cautious and secretive, and thus want to carefully lay in wait while developing the strength to make the revelation of their existence simultaneous with successfully seizing control.  Unfortunately, for the Shadow Lodge, one of its members, a sorcerer named Charvion, is tired of waiting--he wants to act now!  Charvion has planned a major (and by major, I mean several dragons and a horde of goblins) assault on the Grand Lodge.  But there's intrigue within intrigue, because the rest of the Shadow Lodge thinks Charvion is foolish.  So, they feed him red herrings that the Decemvirate's secrets are on scrolls buried beneath the Mortuary at the Grand Lodge.  They hope that, in the likely event Charvion's very public attack fails miserably, the Pathfinder Society either continues to disbelieve in or greatly underestimates the Shadow Lodge's real strength.

Charvion's plan is a bit convoluted, and I don't really understand it.  The general premise is that he plans to use a minor Azlanti artifact recently discovered in the Mwangi Expanse called the Cage of Spirit Echoes.  The Cage allows the user to communicate with the dead.  As hundreds of Pathfinders will be present at the unveiling of the Cage during a major Absalom holiday event (the Passion of the First Siege of Absalom), Charvion plans to have his dragons attack as a distraction while he then takes the Cage and rushes over to the Grand Lodge and fights his way into the Pathfinder Society Mortuary to dig up the Decemvirate secrets.  I'm honestly fuzzy why he needs the Cage to dig up the scrolls, how he has managed to secretly amass an army of dragons and goblins and sneak them into Absalom, and why, as a sorcerer and a Pathfinder in good standing, he couldn't just walk right into the Mortuary in the middle of the night, bump off anyone there, and do his digging without all the drama!  In other words, the plot just doesn't really hold up, and nor do I understand why the rest of the Shadow Lodge would let it go forward--after all, anyone who can amass an army of dragons and goblins and wield an artifact is going to seem like a major threat, so surely the Pathfinder Society will take the Shadow Lodge seriously in the future.  And, that is exactly what happens at the end of the scenario: the existence of the Shadow Lodge is confirmed.  It really makes the Shadow Lodge look kinda dumb, which undermines the dark conspiracy storyline the PFS organisers wanted to tell.

Anyway, the Special moves quickly.  Act 1 starts at a massive stadium in Absalom called the Irorium, where the festival is to take place.  I love that only PCs of the highest subtier gets the "good" seats (next to the field); more scenarios should give perks to those who have earned it!  For some reason, the scenario spends several paragraphs describing the physical features of the Irorium, even though none of it matters because the combat will take place on a flip-mat that is only a pale, symbolic version of it.  When Charvion makes his move and seizes the Cage, the dragons and goblins attack and the PCs need to fight them off in order to escape.

Act 2 has the PCs hearing of an assault on the Grand Lodge, but needing to fight their way through an ambush in the Foreign Quarter before they can get there.  The ambush is more goblins, obstacles (that mechanically function as traps--a bit odd), and a Shadow Lodge cleric of Groetus named Melyra.  If the PCs actually capture Melyra alive and interrogate her, they can get the broad outlines of what is happening; otherwise, they'll probably be completely in the dark.

Act 3 has the PCs needing to fight their way into the Grand Lodge by breaching its falls and overcoming yet more goblin defenders.

Act 4 is interesting, as an old black dragon named Zythrustianax is perched on the roof of the Mortuary.  PCs of the highest subtier can actually fight it if they want, while PCs of every other subtier need to try to sneak in, with failed Stealth checks resulting in the dragon's tail slaps dislodging rubble to drop on them!  There's a nice cooperative element here, as tables can work together to distract Zythrustianax so others can get inside (and, similarly, the first table that manages to break the door down makes things easier for every subsequent table to get in).  There's a nice custom map of the Mortuary to handle multiple encounters inside (more goblins, beetle swarms, spectral undead somehow unleashed by the Cage), and finally Charvion himself.  Unless the PCs were completely devastated by the earlier encounters, they'll probably have no trouble defeating a lone sorcerer (unless, at high subtier, he manages to get off a death spell or two).  When Charvion is defeated, his body and soul are sucked into the Cage of Soul Echoes in a gleeful bit of flavour text.  And now we know: the Shadow Lodge is real!

Pathfinder Society # 9-20: "Fury of the Final Blade" [RPG]

NO SPOILERS

 

I got to play Fury of the Final Blade with my half-orc Paladin, Trokkus.  The scenario takes place in a country I find really interesting but have hardly ever adventured in: Galt.  Galt is Golarion’s analogue to the French Revolution, but as the title of the scenario implies, the guillotines here take not just your head, but your soul!  Although my PC wasn’t particularly well-suited to the scenario, I think it’s well-written and well-designed.  It’s open-ended and allows for some player creativity, develops an NPC arc that had been in progress for years, and is fairly original in terms of plot and gameplay.  These later season PF1 scenarios tend to be steeped in lore, rich in plot, and carefully written.  Fury of the Final Blade is no exception.  It’s definitely worth playing, and perhaps a must-do for members of the Liberty’s Edge.

 

SPOILERS!

 

Major Colson Maldris, long-time leader of Liberty’s Edge, may have gotten (literally) in over his head.  Tying in heavily to # 9-02, we learn in Fury of the Final Blade that Maldris’s plan for the recalcitrant and corrupt nobles of Andoran to face justice in Galt has gone dramatically awry.  Not only are the nobles going to be executed without trial, but Maldris himself faces the chopping block!  Venture-Captain Eliza Petulengro (amazing artwork, but with a personality that doesn’t match) sends the PCs in to Isarn to rescue the Andoren nobles and, if possible, Maldris.  The stakes are high, because if the PCs fail, the Pathfinder Society, Galt, and Andoran could become locked in conflict, and the Red Revolution could spread.  Pretty cool set-up for an adventure!

 

The PCs arrive in Isarn the night before the executions are scheduled, so they don’t have time to rest and need to get into planning the prison break immediately.  There’s lots of options available in terms of preparation, such as trying to time guard patrols, steal uniforms, etc., and this part is fairly open-ended. The scenario is actually a bit confusing on the time element, because in one place it says the group has time to conduct two investigations to prep for the prison break, but elsewhere it gives the specific number of hours different tasks take (without telling the GM how many hours are available).  I like how the prison has sensible precautions in a fantasy world; for example, you can’t just teleport in or easily scry to discern the facility’s layout.

 

The scenario features a cool villain—a Gray Gardener mesmerist named Citizen Dread—along with some tough foes like sakhils and (potentially instantly deadly) banshees.  More, the PCs are likely to rouse the ire of mobs of Galtans, bringing the troop rules into play.  The whole sequence of events can play out differently depending on the PCs’ actions (something every scenario should envision), down to the question of whether the PCs think Maldris is worth rescuing at all since he’s been disloyal to both the Society and to Andoran.

 

In short, Fury of the Final Blade presents lots for the players to work with.  There’s plenty of room for role-playing, combat, strategy, and moral debate, all in the context of a solid story and development of a major NPC and faction.  Putting all of that together in one scenario isn’t easy to do!